Dealigned or Still Salient? Religious-Secular Divisions in Chilean Presidential Elections

With countries like Chile facing secularisation, some research predicts religious-secular cleavages will ‘dealign’, while other research suggests these cleavages will persist so long as religious-secular divisions are reflected among presidential candidates. Using surveys of first-round voting intentions in the five most recent presidential elections in Chile, the analysis shows that religious-secular divisions in voting appear when candidates are divided clearly along religious-secular lines (and not when divisions among candidates are blurred). These findings suggest researchers need to account for the impact candidates' positions have on the appearance of religious-secular divisions before declaring that dealignment has occurred.     

Efficiency over generosity? Evidence of electoral accountability from typhoon dayoff in Taiwan

ABSTRACT

Even though voters may irrationally blame the incumbent for natural disasters, democratic accountability can still hold if voters also reward the government for good responses. This article approaches the response-reward question by exploring the election impact of typhoon dayoff decisions in Taiwan. County mayors are responsible for deciding the dayoffs before a typhoon, so voters can easily and immediately observe the quality of the mayor's decision and fully attribute the outcome to him. Results combining 2005–2014 weather, election, and ten survey datasets show that a correct dayoff, which a dayoff was announced and the storm was tomorrow is harmfully strong, can significantly increase the incumbent's vote share. The effect is larger in the election year. Meanwhile, Taiwanese voters also slightly reward the incumbent for a bonus dayoff, which the storm is unexpectedly weak. Evidence also shows that mayors exploit the incumbent advantage by announcing more correct and bonus dayoffs.     

Forecasting the 2015 British election through party popularity functions

To forecast the May 7, 2015 British General Election, we develop party popularity models based on Continuous Monitoring Survey (CMS) data from April 2004 to February 2015. Our models predict party vote shares three months prior to the election, using previous support levels, national economic evaluations, macro-partisanship and political measures. Our Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) methodology allows us to predict support for the Tories, Labour, Liberal Democrats and “other” parties, separately, yet simultaneously, by constraining total support for all parties to 100%. Our model, estimated with data from February 2015, predicts that Labour will win the highest vote share in Great Britain, but that no party will win a majority of seats in parliament.     

Keynes,Friedman, or Monnet? Explaining parliamentary voting behaviour on fiscal aid for euro area member states

This article investigates the determinants of parliamentary support for international fiscal aid. Departing from the literature on presidential systems, it analyses an exemplary case of a parliamentary system, Germany. Two theoretical accounts are distinguished. The first perceives MPs as policy-seekers and focuses on the positioning of government and opposition parties and individual MPs on an economic left?right and a pro- versus anti-EU dimension. The second regards MPs as vote-seekers and presumes an electoral district connection. The statistical analysis of a new data-set containing information on 17 Bundestag roll-call votes from 2009 to 2015 finds support for the first account: voting in favour of fiscal aid measures is mainly driven by government membership and EU support. By contrast, neither economic ideologies, nor district or mandate characteristics influence support for fiscal aid. The article contributes to a growing literature on the domestic politics of international political economy.     

Winds of Change: Voter Blame and Storm Gudrun in the 2006 Swedish Parliamentary Election

Can a natural disaster shift long-standing party support for the long-term? Studies of political behavior indicate that, as elections approach, voters punish or credit governments based on their responses to severe weather phenomena. It may still be considered an open question, however, if poor crisis response could trigger more durable shifts in long-standing party support. I provide empirical evidence suggesting that it could. I exploit a crucial case for the study of change in party support, Storm Gudrun (Erwin), to examine long lasting punishment effects over crisis response. The estimated effect is of a magnitude that equals the largest block-transfer of voters in Swedish history and can be seen over three parliamentary elections (2006, 2010 and 2014).     

Economic performance and presidential trait evaluations: A longitudinal analysis

Presidential traits (i.e. morality, intelligence, leadership) have generally been assumed to be idiosyncratic personal characteristics of the individual and are treated as exogenous from other political and economic factors. Prior literature has shown that presidential characteristics and economic performance are important elements of vote choice and approval. Using ANES data from 1984 to 2008, we demonstrate an important link between these factors, showing that objective and subjective indicators of economic performance are significant predictors of trait evaluations. Specifically, evaluations of the incumbent president at election time are directly related to changes in economic performance earlier in the year. The effects of economic performance are not isolated to retrospective policy evaluations, but also influence the overall evaluation of the president as a person.     

High turnout in the Low Countries: Partisan effects of the abolition of compulsory voting in the Netherlands

We use a quasi-experimental framework to test the conventional wisdom that left-of-center parties benefit from higher turnout by analyzing the partisan effects of the abolition of compulsory voting in the Netherlands. Fixed effects, multilevel, and matching models of party family vote shares in the Netherlands before and after the reform–and in reference to a control group of Belgian party families–show consistent evidence the voting reform led to an increase in the vote share of Dutch social democratic parties and a decrease in the vote share won by minor and extreme parties. We find some evidence that Christian democratic and liberal parties also benefited from the voting reform, but argue this finding is not causally related to the reform itself.     

Presidential coattails and electoral coordination in multilevel elections: Comparative lessons from Brazil

This article seeks to understand how concurrent presidential and gubernatorial elections in strong federal systems affect electoral coordination and coattails voting between national and subnational levels of government. We seek to determine whether the nationalizing effect of presidential elections can overcome the strong incentives for regionalization that can arise in federal systems. We use individual-level survey data and time-series cross-sectional electoral data from Brazil, a federal country with decentralized electoral institutions that has recently adopted concurrent presidential and gubernatorial elections. We find that the congruence between national and subnational elections increases when elections are temporally proximate and the effective number of presidential candidates is low. In short, the coattails effect can not only operate “horizontally,” by shaping national legislative elections, but also “vertically,” by shaping subnational elections.     

Can Social Media Predict Election Results? Evidence From New Zealand

The importance of social media for election campaigning has received a lot of attention recently. Using data from the 2011 New Zealand general election and the size of candidates’ social media networks on Facebook and Twitter, we investigate whether social media is associated with election votes and probability of election success. Overall, our results suggest that there is a statistically significant relationship between the size of online social networks and election voting and election results. However, the size of the effect is small and it appears that social media presence is therefore only predictive in closely contested elections.     

Is President Obama’s Race Chronically Accessible? Racial Priming in the 2012 Presidential Election

A vast literature indicates that racial animosity has a pervasive influence on the public’s evaluations of U.S. President Barack Obama. Can political communications enhance and/or defuse the link between White Americans’ racial attitudes and evaluations of Barack Obama? In this article, we report the results of an experiment conducted in the midst of the 2012 presidential campaign which examines the effect of political rhetoric on the extent to which evaluations of Barack Obama are racialized. Drawing from research on attitude strength and pretreatment effects in experimental studies, we argue that the use of racial appeals in the pretreatment environment and the strength of citizens’ preexisting attitudes toward the incumbent president may produce a downward bias in average estimates of racial priming effects toward President Obama. After accounting for individual differences in the propensity to form strong attitudes with need to evaluate, we observe substantial effects of campaign rhetoric in priming racial attitudes toward President Obama, especially among individuals who are low in the need to evaluate and who tend to have more malleable political attitudes. We conclude by discussing implications for research on racial priming and the politics of racial intolerance in evaluations of Barack Obama.